Something I've been pondering on. Gaming has progressed a lot in the 20 years I've been into it - for better or for worse. VR is now a thing, digital distribution is default, online connectivity is obligatory, consoles have refused to die out, day 1 patches plague most releases, graphics have sky-rocketed, DLC has replaced mission packs, casual gaming and interactive movie games have brought in billions (of plebs, and dollars).

Things are moving "forward" whether we like it or not. But some aspects we might like or be hyped for, yes??

So, look towards the next 20 years:

What do you think will happen in terms of gaming overall?? What aspects / genres / features etc are likely??

And....what do you WANT to happen?? What aspects / genres / features etc do you hope will be realised as gaming progresses??

......

A couple of desires from me.

1. I hope for general accessibility of games, i.e. all games to be accessible to all players. This means no more exclusives, games made for / ported to all main platforms, fully featured control systems (key rebinds, controllers supported, etc), fully featured graphics options. I guess this is pretty much a pipe dream but it's the main thing I think is still missing from the industry.

2. Gaming franchises being big and deep enough to provide GOOD different genre games in the same universe. Games Workshop games obviously do this but that's a bit of an outlier as that universe is so huge and deep. But there's been mixed success elsewhere. Mechwarrior did it great with Mech Commander (2 at least), but Halo (Wars), Syndicate, XCom cross-genre pollination has been less successful. I'd like to see if devs could do a good job with some franchises out there. Doom4 turn-based squad-tactics (why not? got the weapons and bestiary for it). Starcraft covert-ops FPS (could be great). Dark Souls ARPG (halfway there already).

3. The furthering of the graphical stalemate to allow a focus on strong styles / themes, and on gameplay mechanics. This is already happening that games generally look great these days so you can't make something stand out with fancy water or fog or whatever, but there's still that last push to photo realism which may or may not occur in imminent decades, but if/when it does, and every engine looks broadly comparable, hopefully devs will have to focus on striking art styles on the graphical side, and intriguing gameplay too.

And a couple of predictions:

1. VR will keep being a thing. Because companies can sell VR machines.

Doom4 did a good job I think. I wasn't initially convinced by the "so desperate to avoid D3-style criticism feature ticklist", but really it worked well. It looked great, had some many cool vistas and scenes compared to D3, had the usual RPG-lite-lite tweaks and upgrades, but still good brutal action. OTOH it was a bit artificially arena-y and the bestiary doesn't have the same overall evileness of Quake's best monsters. But it showed a lot of potential for this genre so hopefully it will become more of a thing in the future.

5. DLC being released honestly, suitably priced and clearly and explicitly described.

DLC has a lot of potential to be a really good thing, but also a really bad thing. I'd like there to be an unwritten rule that nothing is deliberately left out of the game, and the released game provides a full and complete experience, and that any additional DLC is just that, additional. I also think it should be kept clear where DLC adds additional features (characters / weapons etc), what DLC is purely cosmetic, and what DLC actually adds additional gameplay areas (levels / missions / etc).

So far I've rarely bought any DLC but sometimes I've seen it done in an appealling way to me. Skyrim DLCs had two full mission pack DLCs that added proper new areas, missions, story, etc etc, just like mission packs of old. And Mordheim shipped with a plenty adequate 4 races, added two more as DLC, as well as characters for each race. The Skaven felt complete "out of the box" with Assassin / Gutter Runner / Grey Seer / Black Skaven / Rat Ogre / 2 basic troops, but I also bought the Plague Wind Globadier to add extra fun, that worked fine.

Obviously the DLC shouldn't be "pay to progress" nor game-breaking....devs and pubs really need to keep that in check.

Like for real, not just on the paper. Moral choices, gameplay style, dialogue, multiple factors combined; not something like binary stuff deciding the ultimate outcome/ending and not things that simply determine the summary cutscene at the end. More like something that can fundamentally change the way the player experiences a game in a 'the journey is its own reward' way with nuances and both micro and macro consequences. And maybe done in a natural way instead of "you've gained/lost karma points".

I get the impression there are not too many actual "gamers" on this forum, and quite a few people who just play quake and bitch about games that aren't quake. Nothing wrong with that - that's to be expected - this is a quake forum after all.

I used to be a "gamer" - I'd say from about 2005 - 2012 (give or take), but then after that I found I didn't really have enough free time to keep up with it, and kinda got bored because every new release just seemed to be some variation of another game I'd already played.

To actually answer the question that's the topic of this thread, I'd say the stuff that impressed me most as a gamer were the big open fantasy worlds like in Elder Scrolls 3, 4 and 5, and I'd really like to see more shit like that - more depth, more scope, more feeling like you're in a huge world with a million different things you can decide to do at any one time. Maybe it's not commercial to go down the "bigger worlds, more shit to do" route though. I think the money is just on cinematic crap and better graphics, like it's always been, and that's a shame.

i don't anticipate anything because i have no idea
i play few games, fewer each year, and i replay a lot the same few games.
in 2016 i played quake, xcom lw, doom, medieval 2 total war and dying light.

desire?
a proper a-life in a stalker-like game, in a game world in wich you can have experiencies like the one in the dialogues and fanfiction occur in real-time. really hard to do, i know.

the same for a skyrim-like game

w40k chaos gate 2: bigger, better, prettier

i'm one of the few who liked age of empires 3. i would like the game to go open-source (never) or some game that combines the best of aoe3 and cossacks 3, and a few new things.

Kinn: I think enough games do "bigger worlds, more shit to do" BUT they don't necessarily make it an interesting world with more depth and scope and varied and meaningful things to do rather than cut and paste side quests. So, yeah good call.

Most of my desires are to do with meta-gaming I guess, how games are delivered and developed. As far as actual content and games go, I quite like seeing what appears next....it's been great in the last few years....

#12 posted by Mike Woodham [109.148.167.181] on 2017/03/23 23:43:17

Anticipate: nothing, that way I am not disappointed

Desire: targeted memory loss, so that I can play Quake like I'd never played it before and experience that same feeling of youfouria, yooforea, ueforeea, uphurea, sheer joy again.

When was the last time a big AAA game tried to make you laugh? And I'm not talking about dorky meme humour like Portal, or objectively crass shite like Bulletstorm.

A non-gamer friend raised this the other day. Would be nice to see a game with good writing that's actually properly witty as well as being a proper game. I think the Fable series wasn't too bad on this front. Can't think of many others.

I played the Stanley Parable a few days ago, that managed to get a real life laugh out of me, twice in fact! The game itself was pretty shit though, and hour of walking through corridors with 10 year old graphics.

What I want, yeah I'd quite like some spiritual successors to Quake. It doesn't even need to be in a modern engine. I can't believe there's all these indie studios making garbage retro sidescrollers, and not one that's making an old 90s shooter like Quake or Doom. It's like the 90s never happened and everyones forgotten what was popular in gaming then!

Next 20 years? Damn, I don't know if I would be even playing games in 20 years.

-Wishful thinking is the return of meaty expansion packs as opposed to day 1 DLC or other exclusives. I'd like for games to not require 2-4 weeks of game breaking fixes after release as well. At this time, I don't buy games newly released because I expect there to be terrible experiencing ruining issues.

-I want to see further releases of quality indie single player games especially in genres of Platformers, Metroidvanias, and couch co-op. Actually in addition to that I would like to see well thought-out co-op experiences in games and not just gimmicks. "Lovers in Dangerous Spacetime" is a good example of a co-op experience that just makes you laugh and panic at the same time.

As others said I would hope to see a return to when games could be laughed not at but with...there is a severe overabundance of serious "cool GFX" copy and paste AAA games that just further saturate the gunky side of games for me.

VR is definitely something in the future and I want games for it to be fully invested in the technology and not just little mini-games.

I'd say something about wanting a return of Quake 1 in someway or at least its design but I won't hold my breath. DOOM 2016 was great, I can't deny that but the single player experience fell too short and what do they do but release 3 fucking multiplayer packs and completely cold shouldering the other crowd.

I'd like to see games be built from passion again and not be sent through the corporate (and sometimes political) meat grinder.

I do think some games inject a bit of sass / cuteness / satire / self-aware jibes. But it's quite minimal.

Personally I have dick all interest in a highly humourous game, but I'm a bit fussy about humour in media (don't like comedy films or spoofs, but do like classic humour / satire and general banter). I think as a general progression towards "eliciting an emotional response" i.e. an actual emotional response rather than a 1 second blatant nudge in a design-by-committee way before you realise how shallow it is, that could be a thing, and agreeing with Kinn, should be a thing.

I saw the GF play a couple of games - Beyond Two Souls, and Life Is Strange, and both of those seemed to reasonably convincingly emotional. I can't remember if humour played much of a role though, and they were quite particular style of story-sim games.

I actually found SOMA provoked some surprising emotional responses, as well as mild fear / panic, there were moments of awe, humour and sadness in that. One of things I liked about it.

It would be interesting to see how much emotion could be convincingly put into a proper action game....

2. VR dominance (someday). VR will be an umbrella that games, film, tools, and other experiences fit under.

3. hyper detailed engines (voxel?) that stand up to scrutiny in VR and look amazing on traditional displays. real-word scanning of assets and digitization of real spaces and characters. Think 90s live action point n click games but not shitty. I think there will be sort of a middle ground between film and games and the two will use similar tech and offer similar experiences.

5. continued merger of industry giants and even more niche/boutique studios to fill the void.

6. attempted, large-scale transhumanism that will ultimately fail and set humanity back some decades, provided that the world doesn't experience world war or some other global catastrophe before then. using a neural implant to get a steady stream of endorphins, serotonin, dopamine, etc. while you level up will be cool for a time, though.

I'd quite like some spiritual successors to Quake. It doesn't even need to be in a modern engine. I can't believe there's all these indie studios making garbage retro sidescrollers, and not one that's making an old 90s shooter like Quake or Doom.

If the people making garbage retro sidescrollers were to make a FPS, it would be a garbage retro FPS.

The kind of talent needed to make a good retro FPS is the kind of talent that makes projects such as Arcane Dimensions. People with a professional attitude and an AAA mentality.

Quake is retro now, but it was AAA back then; the problem with most indie games is that they think of "AAA" and "retro" as opposite concepts - they're thinking only about budget, not about quality. But if we look at good retro works such as Skiffy's Shambler, we often see that they're made by professional AAA developers in their spare time.

Simplicity may be cheap, but quality isn't. Retro game studios can cut some costs due to the simplicity of their games, but if they also want their simple games to be actually good, they need to hire good AAA professionals, and pay the price for that.

holographic games. Being literally immersed in the image must really be something else in terms of sensory experience, even compared to VR. Imagine stumbling upon, say, a shambler twice your size around a corner. Yikes!